At the Yearly Kos panel where Glenn Greenwald beat up on the media and Jay Carney offered up memorable lines such as saying that Time's Iraq coverage was "not awful," I realized that Carney didn't understand the source of the ire about his post which asserted that in January of 1995 Clinton's poll numbers were in the 30s, similar to Bush, when in fact at the time they were in the high 40s.
To Carney this, while admittedly an error, was not especially important because he was comparing what he perceived to be the climate among presidential aides at the time. The poll wasn't really the point, it was the similarity of attitudes of insiders. That was his focus.
I understood his take, but it missed why people are pissed off about this issue. The mainstream media narrative constantly exaggerates the degree to which Clinton was unpopular. Aside from a chunk of the pre-1995 period, Clinton was a wildly popular president. During the Clinton impeachment period, which his poll numbers were skyrocketing, the media focused on his personal favorability number instead of his job approval. But even that number remained quite high, in the 40s and 50s depending on the pollster.
The point is that in Washingtonland Bush is always popular and Clinton was dreadfully unpopular.
